Resilience: Accounting for the Noncomputable

Plans to solve complex environmental problems should always consider the role of surprise. Nevertheless, there is a tendency to emphasize known computable aspects of a problem while neglecting aspects that are unknown and failing to ask questions about them. The tendency to ignore the noncomputable can be countered by considering a wide range of perspectives, encouraging transparency with regard to conflicting viewpoints, stimulating a diversity of models, and managing for the emergence of new syntheses that reorganize fragmentary knowledg

The ethics of socio-ecohydrological catchment management: towards hydrosolidarity

International audienceThis paper attempts to clarify key biophysical issues and the problems involved in the ethics of socio-ecohydrological catchment management. The issue in managing complex systems is to live with unavoidable change while securing the capacity of the ecohydrological system of the catchment to sustain vital ecological goods and services, aquatic as well as terrestrial, on which humanity depends ultimately. Catchment management oriented to sustainability has to be based on ethical principles: human rights, international conventions, sustaining crucial ecological goods and services, and protecting ecosystem resilience, all of which have water linkages. Many weaknesses have to be identified, assessed and mitigated to improve the tools by which the ethical issues can be addressed and solved: a heritage of constraining tunnel vision in both science and management; inadequate shortcuts made in modern scientific system analyses (e.g. science addressing sustainability issues); simplistic technical-fix approaches to water and ecosystems in land/water/ecosystem management; conventional tools for evaluation of scientific quality with its focus on ?doing the thing right? rather than ?doing the right thing?. The new ethics have to incorporate principles that, on a catchment basis, allow for proper attention to the hungry and poor, upstream and downstream, to descendants, and to sites and habitats that need to be protected. Keywords: catchment, hydrosolidarity, ecosystem, water determinants, resilience, green water, blue water, sustainability scienc

A Gubernatorial Helping Hand? How Governors Affect Presidential Elections

It is commonly argued in the media that a presidential candidate will be helped in a state by having a governor of the same party in office. However, there is little research to support this claim. To address this question we use a regression discontinuity design. The basic idea behind this is that in very close elections the party of the governor is decided essentially by a coin flip. Focusing on these very close elections therefore allows us to estimate the causal effect of gubernatorial party control. We show that a presidential candidate is not helped, but in fact hurt, by having a governor from the same party. On average, winning the governors election leads to a 23 percentage point reduction in a states presidential vote share in the following election. Using a similar methodology, we also show that voters punish the presidential party when voting for governor in midterm years. Having established these relationships, we explore why this is the case. One possible explanation is a variation of the ideological balancing argument, whereby voters choices for one office are conditional on which party holds office at a different level

On Resilient Behaviors in Computational Systems and Environments

The present article introduces a reference framework for discussing resilience of computational systems. Rather than a property that may or may not be exhibited by a system, resilience is interpreted here as the emerging result of a dynamic process. Said process represents the dynamic interplay between the behaviors exercised by a system and those of the environment it is set to operate in. As a result of this interpretation, coherent definitions of several aspects of resilience can be derived and proposed, including elasticity, change tolerance, and antifragility. Definitions are also provided for measures of the risk of unresilience as well as for the optimal match of a given resilient design with respect to the current environmental conditions. Finally, a resilience strategy based on our model is exemplified through a simple scenario.Comment: The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40860-015-0002-6 The paper considerably extends the results of two conference papers that are available at http://ow.ly/KWfkj and http://ow.ly/KWfgO. Text and formalism in those papers has been used or adapted in the herewith submitted pape

Paths to Mobility Support in the Future Internet

The efficient support of various mobility types is one of the main challenges in anticipating evolutions towards the Future Internet. The European 4WARD project applies a "clean-slate" architectural approach where the Generic Path, a new communication abstraction, organizes the necessary cooperation between nodes for realising a wide range of communication services from unicast/multicast conversational services to multi point transfer between cooperating information objects. Our work addresses the challenges of supporting different mobility types in the context of Generic Paths by elaborating innovative schemes that will be further evaluated and combined in a second step. The Dynamic Mobility Anchoring proposal considers the distribution of mobility anchors in Access Nodes realising the necessary traffic indirection when hosts connectivities change. Anchorless mobility applies a more abstract approach where so called compartment are used to realise dynamic bindings between end points. A main issue for supporting wide scale mobility is the availability of a common namespace and an efficient resolution scheme. We address this issue with a high focus. Lastly considering mobile ad hoc networking as a key environment for its high level of dynamicity, we envisage the application of end to end concurrent multi-path transfer methods in such a context. Our research opens several future perspectives such as further designing, evaluating, refining and combining the different innovations and algorithms in a coherent mobility framework for Generic Paths

Perceptions of trends in Seychelles artisanal trap fisheries: comparing catch monitoring, underwater visual census and fishers' knowledge

Fisheries scientists and managers are increasingly engaging with fishers' knowledge (FK) to provide novel information and improve the legitimacy of fisheries governance. Disputes between the perceptions of fishers and scientists can generate conflicts for governance, but can also be a source of new perspectives or understandings. This paper compares artisanal trap fishers' reported current catch rates with landings data and underwater visual census (UVC). Fishers' reports of contemporary 'normal' catch per day tended to be higher than recent median landings records. However, fishers' reports of 'normal' catch per trap were not significantly different from the median CPUE calculated from landings data, and reports of 'good' and 'poor' catch rates were indicative of variability observed in landings data. FK, landings and UVC data all gave different perspectives of trends over a ten-year period. Fishers' perceptions indicated greater declines than statistical models fitted to landings data, while UVC evidence for trends varied between sites and according to the fish assemblage considered. Divergence in trend perceptions may have resulted from differences in the spatial, temporal or taxonomic focus of each dataset. Fishers may have experienced and understood behavioural changes and increased fishing power, which may have obscured declines from landings data. Various psychological factors affect memory and recall, and may have affected these memory-based estimates of trends, while different assumptions underlying the analysis of both interview data and conventional scientific data could also have led to qualitatively different trend perceptions. Differing perspectives from these three data sources illustrate both the potential for 'cognitive conflicts' between stakeholders who do not rely on the same data sources, as well as the importance of multiple information sources to understand dynamics of fisheries. Collaborative investigation of such divergence may facilitate learning and improve fisheries governance

Chapter 04: Ecological resilience, climate change and the Great Barrier Reef

The vulnerability assessments in this volume frequently refer to the resilience of various ecosystem elements in the face of climate change. This chapter provides an introduction to the concept of ecological resilience, and its application as part of a management response to climate change threats. As defined in the glossary, resilience refers to the capacity of a system to absorb shocks, resist dramatic changes in condition, and maintain or recover key functions and processes, without undergoing “phase shifts” to a qualitatively different state. For example, people who are physically and mentally fit and strong will have good prospect of recovery from disease, injury or trauma: they are resilient.This is Chapter 4 of Climate change and the Great Barrier Reef: a vulnerability assessment. The entire book can be found at http://hdl.handle.net/11017/13

Optimising nudges and boosts for financial decisions under uncertainty

Behavioural interventions that directly influence decision-making are increasingly popular policy tools. Two prominent interventions used are nudges, which promote an optimal choice without restricting options, and boosts, which promote individual capabilities to make more informed choices. Direct comparison is a critical step toward understanding the populations and contexts where they may be most efficient, or potentially complementary toward improving their effectiveness. Two trials in the US and Serbia (N=1,423) tested a series of choices under uncertainty using both nudge and boost interventions. In a replication setting, hypothetical and consequential decisions are used. Findings indicate that disclosure nudges and boosts, unlike social nudges, promote more advantageous financial decisions. Furthermore, the effects of disclosure nudges and boosts generally differ depending on loss and gain framing – boosts promoted more advantageous decisions under gain frames while disclosure nudges did so under loss frames. Finally, boosts were typically more effective for those who initially made suboptimal choices and sociodemographic factors did not mediate the effectiveness of the interventions. These insights provide clarity to highly nuanced, complex patterns across population behaviours in the context of financial choice under uncertainty and considerable implications for the design of interventions for policies that impact population behaviours.This study was funded in part by the Economic and Social Research Council, Global Challenges Research Fund (ES/P010962/1) within the R4HC-MENA project. Some support was also provided by Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

Ammonia Decomposition in the Process Chain for a Renewable Hydrogen Supply

This review article deals with the challenge to identify catalyst materials from literature studies for the ammonia decomposition reaction with potential for application in large-scale industrial processes. On the one hand, the requirements on the catalyst are quite demanding. Of central importance are the conditions for the primary reaction that have to be met by the catalyst. Likewise, the catalytic performance, i.e., an ideally quantitative conversion, and a high lifetime are critical as well as the consideration of requirements on the product properties in terms of pressure or by-products for potential follow-up processes, in this case synthesis gas applications. On the other hand, the evaluation of the multitude of literature studies poses difficulties due to significant varieties in catalytic testing protocols